Comments from participants

New message comes top of the list. Date is based on Japanese time when administrator received e-mail.

From Francoise (16th Fri) -uploaded on 19th Mon
Dear Serge,
I’m very happy to get news from you. I hope everything is going well, and I remember the good discussion we had on the week-end in Blois in July. I have just learned about my desease at that moment, and Patrick, Nicole and Ito knew it. But I received such a good energy with all of you in that moment that I decided that it was that the important thing in my live what will happen after. And the first thing my Tibetan master said to me when I told him this problem ” don’t worry!” and I could understand that I could that to keep all my good energy instead of being worried and have bad feelings of fear, anxiety, so I could do that with other people around me who helped me to maintain this state of mind.
So thank you to you to give me a part of your strength I could observe in this week-end.
Very friendly. Françoise

From Connie (15th Thu) -uploaded on 19th Mon
We will be practicing Taimyo in SF on the 19th of Sept as well. We will hold you in our thoughts and in our hearts.
Connie

From Nicole (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
I am very moved by all the answers to the mail of Françoise. Thank you for our new friend.
Love
Nicole

From Serge (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
Dear Francoise,
Thank’s’for your report on taimyo kata. It’s’a really wonderfull kata which have good effect all arround. So we sall be present on 19 september to help you and give thé best of our heart.
Last sunday we practice with Aki in my little garden, and after we are very peacefull.

Serge.

From Clelie (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
Dear Françoise, dear all of you,
I will be practising Taimyo on the 19th of Sept too. Maybe with Serge Magne. We will hold you in our hearts as well.

Thanks much for your nice and deep reports!
Let me share with you my experience of last Sunday.
Last Sunday I have practised Taimyo at countryside (about 1h30 from Paris) with my husband Julio and my mother Lilie. She and my father Jean, were just arriving from New Caledonia where they were living since 8 years. Renato, the father of my husband, who is living in Rio de Janeiro, was there too. And Milena, my 4 years’ daughter was so happy to be with her grands-parents.
So it was a joyful and exceptionnal family meeting.
During Taimyo, I have seen many birds flying above us. And also one squirrel running on the grass.
I felt the power of the Nature and a deep relationship with heaven, earth, family and shintaido community.

Clelie

From Connie Borden (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
We will be practicing Taimyo in SF on the 19th of Sept as well. We will hold you in our thoughts and in our hearts.
Connie

From Connie Borden (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
Thank you Ula and everyone,
Very powerful messages of our interconnection and support we receive when we practice together, even at a “distance”.
Connie

From Ula (15th Thu) -uploaded on 16th Fri
Thank you Francoise. I agree that Taimyo kata can also mark times of celebration and joy, and I think it is an excellent idea to do that. Maybe we can find the dates of Peace agreements or reconciliations to commemorate, as well as times dates of tragic events. It is our mission/duty to rejoice in our lives and to bring joy into the lives of others. In my work as a physiotherapist I believe that to give people hope for their future is every bit as important as the physical therapy, there are so many ways to do this, aren’t there? And we try, whatever our own condition.

I will be together with you too on the 19th along with Lee and others.

From Françoise (14th Wed) -uploaded on 16th Fri
IT IS TRUE…! That’s the reason why we have such a power on what happens for us first and in the world as a consequence… The mental power is stronger than physical because one is illimited not the other…and I’m feeling a good mental health that will help me too.
Thank you for your truly involvment the 19th of september. That’s sounds so great…

I will mark my calenday for Sept. 19, and will let people here know, also. We will be with you in Taimyo (it sounds strange, but I really believe that it is true.)

Lee Seaman

From Françoise (14th Wed) -uploaded on 16th Fri
Dear Ula,
Thank you for your report. I should like to make you know that I will be operated from a breast cancer on the 19 th of september, not to get pity but I think that my words are not the same in this perspective. I had to think over very hard of what is the most important for me in this world, what I wished to be and I found that it is love that helped me a lot, so that I could laugh and cry during all these days not because of my desease but each time I was or not in correspondece with whom I love.
I tell this because for our children who are so filled with joy, with energy we just can’t show them a world based only on sorrow, disease, death, catatrophs, pain, even if we can’t either hide them . It is said that “happiness can’t be told” and many stories tell only sad things to obtain happiness in the end but the story stops here and we don’t know how to live happiness as if happiness was synonymous of annoyment, a break between coming back to sorrow, fighting, struggle, stress, that are our real nway of life.
Perhaps we could make Taimyo not only for catastrophs birthday, but also for great moments of Joy that give a new blood to traditional feasts like Christmas ( but many people are not Christian), or religious dates ( but many people aren’t religious) . Make Joy alive, real, concrete , not an instant that can be destroyed so easily .

Françoise

From Ula Chambers(14th Wed)
Dear all,

How nice to have some correspondence once again. In the Uk a number of people were doing distance Taimyo at 10-10.30 on Sunday 11th September. Locally it was just Jeff and myself on our balcony looking towards the sea.

Jeff (my husband) has been studying part one of Taimyo with me since Ito’s July workshop in France. We have rarely missed a day. On Sunday I wanted to do more than part one, so Jeff watched quietly. The very act of silent watching or witness was a very powerful experience and I felt his and all of your presence very keenly and deeply in my body.

The peace I found this time was not a happy peace but a peaceful awareness of the suffering in the world. Through part 3 it was a little like Francoise said: being part of a great stream of life – which through its journey carries with it not only fresh, fast flowing water, but also all manner of debris, bits of broken life that have fallen in and are swept away. I was very keenly aware of the suffering of people with too much water as the flood victims in Southern USA, and Tsunami survivors, but also those who suffer from a lack of water and nourishment in Africa and beyond. I was joined by the tears of the mothers of Beslan, and the private grief of friends/family who are fighting illness and personal loss. I guess we are all sensitive to world events, and accepting that hardship and sorrow are part of our stream of life can also bring with it a kind of peace.

Some times, of course, I find great rejoicing in Taimyo too *S* so its balanced out over time.

From Françoise(13th Tue)
Dear all,
Thank you to share your moments of joy, even your moments of sorrow that show great confidence in ourselves , and acceptation of each feeling .
I was coming back from an another retreat of meditation and thinking over of what kind of stability I could find in this world where so many disturbances occur every day for others( accidents of planes this summer, typhoon in America…) or for the ones so near of my heart ( my children, parents), or for myself. How not to live always in sorrow, nor in fear , nor in indifference, not to be an object moved by external circumstances, and I am finding more and more that I must integrate inside me what makes me suffering instead of rejecting it as enemy : it is not so easy because it needs to unify inside me what I’m used to separate, but when I feel like that I can feel as if I am in a great stream that leads me, and in the same time I am the stream as well. I think that it comes from all the people like you and like those with whom I was these last months with Tibetan masters and all those who show me love and loving kindness, as my family, (my son, my daughter, my grand-children, father, brothers, sister, …..) and my friends aven if they aren’t in the same way, I know they want the same thing : happiness for themselves and for the ones they love, and even for those they don’t know…
With you. Françoise

From Nicole (12th Mon)
Dear friends,
Thank you Patrick for your mail, I am going to call you.
Thank you Lee for your report, it is very nice to imagine you friends that I saw very recently to do TAIMYO next to the church.
Good idea and I am sure people have been impressed.
Our group of 3 people made a very nice and peacefull moment thru the practice of the kata of TAI CHI, they do not practice SHINTAIDO (yet for some of them who seem interested also by Shintaido) and when I explained about theTAIMYO network they liked the idea very much. I had brought a little candle, we did review the technics as I am a little advance in the practice and we also did a Kenko Taiso warming up that they loved, then at the end, the candle was in front of us, we were facing the nature thru the big windows of the dojo.
We also spoke about how important this kind of practices are to bring us peace in ourselve first of all.
I am glad, this group could joint our network.
With Love,
Nicole

From Nicole (12th Mon)
Thank you very much Connie, it is very nice to imagine the group of 10 at Marin Academy.
For you information, Connie and Mike have arranged their garage with nice wooden floor and fresh paint, it is there dojo and they invite also friends for the practive of TAIMYO kata, such a good idea.
Love to you,
Nicole

From Bela Breslau (12th Mon)
Stephen & I did Taimyo last night before bed. The end of the day of this year’s 9.11.

Bela

From Connie, respondint to Lee (12th Mon)
Thank you Lee for your report.

From San Rafael, California, we have 10 people practicing in the gym at Marin Academy.
I hope the other groups had a successful practice.
Connie

From Lee Seaman (12th Mon)
Dear all,

We had a quiet but powerful Taimyo meditation in Bellingham this morning, and felt the worldwide Taimyo connection.

Our regular Monday Taimyo group has met for three years in my church. But since September 11 was on a Sunday this year, the church was otherwise occupied, and we couldn’t get a room :-/

So we did Taimyo in a very small children’s park right across from the church, during the half hour before the church service, and then went in and attended the service.

I didn’t really think many people would see us — I was just trying to find a place where we could do Taimyo and then go to church afterwards. But of course lots of people recognized the two of us who were there — no one honked, but several people waved, and after the service one man thanked me and said he found my “Tai chi practice” very peaceful and grounding. (I said, “Thank you, please join us any time!)